Based on the feature film by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, who both executive produce the series along with Paul Simms, the FX comedy series What We Do in the Shadows is back for Season 2 with more nightly exploits of vampire roommates Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Laszlo (Matt Berry) and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), as they navigate the human world. And with their human familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) wondering whether he’s destined to be a vampire or if he’s truly a vampire hunter, there’s sure to be a crisis of character, just around the corner.

During this interview with Collider, co-stars Matt Berry and Natasia Demetriou talked about how much fun this show is to make, how the improvisation helps to make things feel more natural, playing your part in ensuring that the ensemble is funny, all of the moving parts that go into making things work, having more filthy jokes in Season 2, and what they appreciate about their characters.

Collider: Is this show just a blast to work on?

MATT BERRY: Yeah, it’s good fun. I like it. I enjoy it. It’s different and it’s very free. The scripts are starting points and then we go from there. That’s how I like to work, anyway. So, for me, it was perfect. That’s my background, improvisation. It was home for me in that department.

NATASIA DEMETRIOU: It’s very rare to be able to do a show where the most important thing is being funny. That’s always the most important thing. It’s about, is it funny? Is it stupid? And that’s amazing. So, to do that, from doing comedy my whole life, it’s a dream come true. It’s so lovely.

Improvisation doesn’t work in every circumstance.

BERRY: No, it really doesn’t.

Why do you think it works so well in this instance?

BERRY: It’s a luck thing. It’s not only a show. Certain performers don’t necessarily wanna work like that, or feel comfortable working like that, and I understand that. It’s not for everyone. But for this, it’s got to look natural, to an extent. It should look like you’ve just thought about what you said in that second, as opposed to a great long speech that you’ve worked on.

Are there challenges in not just being funny yourself, but also having it work as a group?

BERRY: Yeah. Any ensemble thing is not just about you. Once you start thinking like that, then you’re in trouble. It’s like anything. If you’re wanting to portray something realistic with a bunch of people in the same room at once, then it’s never about one person. It’s about them all speaking to one another. So it’s about making that look realistic, but at the same time, it’s gotta be funny. The thing about this show is that, ‘cause it’s not heavily scripted with a foot on your head, you can go on for as long as you want..

DEMETRIOU: No one will stop you.

BERRY: And then they’ll just pick whatever they want, from whatever the whole thing was.

DEMETRIOU: I’ve learned a lot. As you start off doing comedy, you think, “I’ve gotta get a funny thing.” But doing this show has taught me a lot about often saying nothing. It’s not about one person. It’s about a room full of people, and making all of that balance and bounce off of each other. Actually, the best stuff comes from silence sometimes.

BERRY: You look at a scene and you quickly weigh what the purpose of that scene is, and it might just be to get one bit of information across in order for something to make sense two scenes later, so it’s obvious what the point of the scene is. And if you don’t engineer it with anything you’re doing that particularly pushes that, then you can shut up and let that work itself out. You don’t have to be showboating at that point, because it could be someone else’s moment. It’s about sussing that out.

When you do get to play around like that, are you ever surprised which take they go with?

BERRY: I don’t look at a lot of stuff afterwards.

DEMETRIOU: With the first season, the only thing that stood out to me was that they’re quite short episodes. In the UK, comedies run for half an hour, 28 minutes or 24 minutes. Over here, it’s different ‘cause you have more ad breaks. But that was the only thing where I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” But otherwise, no. I have complete faith in Jermaine [Clement] and the team behind the show, with whatever they pick. It’s like six of one, half dozen of the other. We’ll do a scene where Matt puts a hat on his head, and we’ll do the scene where he doesn’t put the hat on his head, and they’re equally as funny, for different reasons. The show is so much more than anything that I’ve ever been part of, with the scenes, the costumes and the sets. It’s quite a spectacle, and that’s what I took away from it. There’s so much going on. There’s stunts, there’s special effects, there’s the fact that we’re vampires, and it’s a mockumentary. So the fact that they manage to edit down the amount of stuff that we film into that length is just a marvel, and to have all of the episodes make sense is a real feat.

What can you say about Season 2 and where your characters are going?

BERRY: It’s much of the same.

DEMETRIOU: And it’s pushing, more and more. I do feel like, when I saw the film, the one thing I was blown away by, more than anything, was what a good idea it was. Having people who take himself very seriously, and who have all of this history and tradition, and then be exposed in a documentary style is gonna be funny for a really long time. Comedy characters that take themselves very seriously, but are actually fools, is so funny. So the second season is just pushing that more and further.

BERRY: You could put an episode from the second season within the first season, and I don’t think you’d notice that one was vastly different from the other. It’s just another day.

DEMETRIOU: It’s the mundanity of the vampires waking up and figuring out what they’re gonna do in this day.

They also seem like they’ve chosen not to have a lot of character growth.

BERRY: That’s the point. If you’re playing characters which have a manifesto of sorts, in that they don’t like the sunlight, and they don’t like this, that and the other, and they can’t do this or that, that’s gold because there’s a million things that you can do.

DEMETRIOU: It’s weird ‘cause rather than building on a character, it’s about learning more about all of the stuff that they’ve done. That’s what’s great. This season, they bring up more stuff that maybe we did 200 years ago, and it comes to the forefront. And they’re magic and they can do stuff that’s otherworldly. We’ve got the tone of the show and the characters from Season 1, and they’re really pushing that in Season 2. It’s got quite a cheeky, filthy edge. Maybe there are a little bit more filthy jokes. There’s more of that stuff.

BERRY: It’s reminiscent of the orgy stuff. I would say that it’s along the same lines ‘cause you don’t want to fuck around with it too much, if it looks like it worked in some way.

Are there things that you’ve grown to appreciate these characters, the longer you’ve played them?

DEMETRIOU: Oh, 100%, yeah. I think that happens with most stuff that you do. I didn’t know that my character would have a horrific singing voice, but then they made me sing and I was like, “Oh, it’s funny to do this like my mom sings.” And how filthy we are together. I didn’t think that would be a thing at the beginning when I got the part. I wasn’t like, “Oh, she’s a really sexually promiscuous character.” And we didn’t know that we were gonna be cast in it together. You meet the person you’ve gotta play off of, and what Matt does influences what I think about our couple, and vice versa.

BERRY: Yeah, definitely. We’ve been lucky like that.

DEMETRIOU: If we’re making fart jokes on the show, when the cameras stop rolling, the fart jokes continue.

BERRY: There are things that make us laugh, that we put in.

DEMETRIOU: It’s a dream.

What We Do in the Shadows airs on Wednesday nights on FX, and is available to stream at FX on Hulu. Click here for all our previous coverage.